Here we can add
Application Insights feature to your project which should help us to
understand what users are doing with our application, how often they
launch it, in what environments, etc. For our test application we
don't need it by now.

Next, we need to select
template – basically it is – Empty, MVC or Web Forms:

We will select Web Forms
now (we will select MVC template next time for our investigation). We
don't need unit tests and hosting in the cloud for this project. In
Change Authentication window we can change authentication from
Individual User Accounts (default) to No Authentication,
Organizational Accounts (i.e. Active Directory) or Windows
Authentication (Intranet application).

So pressing OK and our
template is being generated, actually got a lot of files!

Let's launch our solution
and browse through pages.

We have Home, About,
Contact, Register, Log in pages though we haven't written a single
line of code yet. But what is more important we notice we have clean
URLs without .aspx – like in MVC. This is achieved with the help of
Microsoft.AspNet.FriendlyUrls library which was described by Scott
Hanselman https://aspnetfriendlyurls.codeplex.com/
. Together with this library we have ViewSwitcher control allowing to
switch between desktop and mobile views of the page.

Another techniques we
should pay attention to are bundling and minification. Rick Anderson
described them for Web Forms here:

Main target of using these
techniques is to improve request load time. Code for creating bundles
in in Global.asax.cs file. Look at Bundle.config file, there you can
add your own files as well.

ASP.NET identity (logging
in / registration of user) uses Microsoft OWIN Authentication
middleware for forms authentication. OWIN (Open Web Interface for
.NET) is an open source project which defines interactions between
web servers and application components (owin.org). In References of
our solution there are several assemblies related to OWIN, for
example:

Microsoft.Owin.Host.System.Web
- contains an OWIN server that enables OWIN-based
applications to run on IIS using the ASP.NET request pipeline

Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Owin -
contains a set of OWIN extension classes to manage and configure
OWIN authentication middleware